A Wild Night for the Solana Network
Picture this: it’s a quiet Saturday evening, and suddenly a comedy of errors plays out in the blockchain world. Solana, the ambitious superstar blockchain renowned for its NFT ecosystem, goes completely dark for seven hours due to a staggering surge of transactions spurred on by NFT minting bots. It’s like a digital party where no one RSVP’d, and now nobody can get in!
The Reasons Behind the Chaos
When bots flock to a popular application—in this case, the Metaplex Candy Machine—things can get messy. A whopping four million transactions or 100 gigabits of data per second overwhelmed the network, leading validators to be knocked out of consensus. Think of it like a group of friends trying to agree on a movie, but everyone keeps talking over each other. In the end, the movie? Not happening.
How Long Did It Take?
After this bit of digital pandemonium—lasting from approximately 8:00 PM UTC on Saturday to 3:00 AM UTC on Sunday—the validators finally managed to restart the network. Kudos to them, right? But wait! Network operators and dApps still had to work to restore client services over the next several hours. Just shows that when one door closes, you better hope the window stays open so you can crawl out later.
A Costly Price for SOL
The fallout wasn’t just digital chaos; it also hit the market, with SOL—the network’s native token—seeing a nearly 7% drop in price, tumbling down to around $84. It’s like a bad case of buyer’s remorse experienced overnight. Fortunately, like those awkward party guests who eventually find their way home, trading saw prices rebound to just over $89.
The Broader Picture: More Outages in 2022
This isn’t Solana’s first rodeo. This incident marks the seventh major outage this year! From transaction overloads to network stalls, Solana’s experienced its fair share of ups and downs. In January, there was everything from partial outages lasting over 29 hours to poor performance causing the network’s claimed capacity of 50,000 transactions per second to dwindle down into the “several thousand” TPS range. If the blockchain world had business hours, Solana might be considering shorter weekend shifts.
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